CSIRO launches FishMap
From identifying what's on the end of your fishing line, to finding out which fishes occur in your local waters, FishMap has the answersFishMap is a free online mapping tool that allows anyone interested in fish to discover which fish species occur at any location or depth throughout the marine waters of Australia’s continental shelf and slope.
Now you can find out what species are found where. as well as having an instant guide to any fish that catch or see.
FishMap also lets people create regional illustrated species lists for almost all of Australia’s marine fishes, detailed with photographs and illustrations, distribution maps and current scientific and common names.
FishMap was developed by CSIRO’s Wealth from Oceans Flagship and the Atlas of Living Australia.
"Australia’s marine biodiversity is among the richest in world, but until FishMap we lacked an Australia-wide capability to rapidly produce regional, illustrated species lists," says ichthyologist Mr Daniel Gledhill of CSIRO’s Wealth from Oceans Flagship.
"FishMap is the only resource of its kind in the world that covers virtually all species of marine fish found in the marine waters of an entire continent."
FishMap has a myriad of uses, from creating a personalised pictorial guide or identifying fish spotted during a dive, to plotting the range of a threatened species, to improving quality of data collected by citizen scientists, field workers and scientists, or determining the possible species composition for catches of any fishery in the waters of Australia’s continental shelf and slope.
The tool provides the scientifically known geographical and depth ranges of over 4500 Australian marine fishes, including 320 sharks and rays, of which over 95 per cent have an associated image or illustration. Searches reveal illustrated lists of fishes by area, depth, family or ecosystem. Lists can be printed to create simple guides or data can be downloaded into a spreadsheet to create templates for data collection.
"FishMap is built on the Atlas of Living Australia’s open infrastructure and perfectly illustrates our purpose to bring the rich data from Australia’s biological collections to the fingertips of everyone from scientists to the public,” says program manager Peter Doherty of the Atlas of Living Australia.
"The Atlas team has built FishMap quickly and efficiently by leveraging the existing open infrastructure that currently delivers over 36 million species occurrence and specimen records to Australian researchers,” he says.
FishMap builds on more than a century of research by Australian ichthyologists and on the work of museums and research agencies across Australia who contributed underlying data and images.
FishMap will be officially launched on Tuesday 26 February 2013 and is available on the Atlas of Living Australia website: http://fish.ala.org.au
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